Thursday, 30 April 2015

Sounds pretty impressive. Doctors — at least in England —
are many of them still, I’m afraid, among the worst, or best, of bullshit
artists: they bamboozle their patients with long words. I suppose it’s some
deep-seated insecurity; a secret fear that perhaps being a doctor isn’t such a
big deal after all. (And let me say at once that I for one think being a doctor
is a very big deal indeed.)

My uncle — I can talk more freely about this now it’s been a
couple of years since he popped his clogs — had a tendency to fall briefly
asleep at inappropriate moments. Sometimes it would happen in concerts, and not
because, like the Mayor and Corporation hogging the front row because they’re
obliged to be there but are bored stiff — Tony loved ‘serious’ music; he was
president of one of the better provincial orchestras — and then he would snore,
and wake up with a disruptive start. Even as a child, in pre-war working-class
Hull, he would fall asleep in class, and the teachers were told not to be cross
but to let him sleep on — a surprisingly liberal attitude for the time and
place.

Anyway, it continued all his life, and he would see
specialists about it. He wanted them to prescribe him various speedy drugs to
keep him awake, and they always refused, to his indignation. He didn’t know,
hadn’t been told, though it was obvious to anyone who had seen the condition in
him and others, that he was hypomanic, so that taking speed could be
disastrous.

I would sometimes pop in to see him, especially in the last
few years of his life, when he was deaf and his spine had crumbled but he would
still totter around with a Zimmer frame. I had my own key — he might be
upstairs downloading Rachmaninov, he might be fast asleep over a cold cup of
tea in the kitchen, and either way he wouldn’t hear the doorbell and it would
be hard for him to get to the door if he did.

One afternoon I found him in very cheerful mood: ‘Oh, Simon,
they’ve finally found out what’s wrong with me!’ ‘Oh, yes?’ ‘Yes! It’s called —
’ (and here he fished out a scrap of paper and painstakingly read it aloud) — ‘Idiopathic
Hypersomnia!’ ‘Well, well, Tony, that is good
news; at last you know what you’ve got!’

Of course I didn’t tell him that ‘Idiopathic Hypersomnia’,
translated out of the medical miscegenation of Latin and Greek, means ‘A
personal tendency to sleep too much.’

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

‘Spokespersons’ are people employed by large organizations —
Governments, International Charities, Big Business — to make announcements to
the public, usually via ‘The Media’ (newspapers, television, radio). Obviously,
they need to be masters or mistresses of at least one language, and to be, like
the very few schoolteachers one really liked, good at explaining things.

Until this morning, my favourite spokesperson quotation was
by a lady speaking on behalf of the American Government. I can’t remember what
it was she was informing the public about, but it doesn’t matter, because she
said

‘We shall continue to monitor the situation and to consider
appropriate action.’

Until this morning, I said. Today, a spokesperson for the
United Nations, referring to relief efforts following the Nepalese earthquake,
said:

Monday, 27 April 2015

In the nineteenth century, when the stench of London’s
almost non-existent drains penetrated the perceptions of even the denizens of
the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, right beside the open sewer of the
Thames, the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to design and
build a huge network of underground sewers. With Victorian efficiency he built
tunnels tall enough for a man to stand upright in, and the system has remained
in use, with routine maintenance, to this day.

However, just recently, there was a serious blockage in
Kensington, where the rich people live, served by expensive fashionable
restaurants. Workers were sent down to investigate and discovered a ten-ton
lump of congealed fat. Comment seems superfluous.

Sunday, 26 April 2015

There is a Norwegian chap called Stavros here in the island.
Not his real name of course, but Stavros is easier to pronounce. He is a little
older than I am and we both have respiratory problems. Nevertheless we both
walk every day — though not, except by chance, at the same time — to the little
church of John the Baptist; about a mile there and a mile back. The path passes
by the place Fat Maria — a woman of spectacular stupidity who knows, and relays
with relish, all the local gossip — keeps her goats, just past the ancient
alonia or threshing floors.

Stavros has a Ukranian girlfriend, and they spent the winter
in Mariopol, a city not noted for pure air, and Stavros got very ill. In fact,
a rumour reached the island that he’d died. Then we heard he would be arriving
back in the island on the next day’s ferry, so it was assumed this would be in
a box and the sexton hastily dug a suitable hole in the little cemetery just
outside the village.

Antonio drove down to meet the ferry and bring the box up,
while well-wishers gathered at the cemetery to see Stavros into the earth. Antonio
was surprised to see Stavros walking — albeit slowly, with a stick — down the
gangplank. They drove up together to the cemetery and there was general
rejoicing: it’s usual after a burial for the mourners to go for drinks to a
nearby taverna, and of course they all did, the only difference this time being
that the late lamented was present in body as well as spirit.

The next day Stavros set out on his usual walk. Maria was
sitting on the ground knitting, surrounded by her goats. When she looked up and
saw Stavros approaching up the footpath, she gaped, screamed, dropped her
knitting, and ran off as fast as her fat little legs would carry her.

Saturday, 25 April 2015

In a way, the fact that people claim to have read
Dostoevsky, or Proust, yet know not a word of Russian or French, is a tribute
to the literary translator; the Constance Garnetts and Scott-Moncrieffswhom most readers don’t even notice. Until
recently translators, if mentioned at all, were commended for their
invisibility, their blandness: if reviewers said anything at all about their
work, it was likely to be ‘The translation flows smoothly’, as if a book were a
gentle river and never a raging torrent, a cataract, a meandering towards an
estuary, a stagnant marsh…

Things are changing, though even now people one had thought
intelligent turn out to think that foreign novels get into English without
human agency. Yesterday I heard of a corresponding ignorance about
interpreting: I was talking with Aris Laskaratos, an Athens publisher
specializing in editions in other languages of works by well- (and lesser-) known
Modern Greek writers. Aris has sometimes to attend conferences which are
addressed by people of various nationalities in their own languages. Off to one
side there is of course a row of interpreters with headsets, busily turning the
speeches into other languages — believe me, it needs a cool head, mental
agility, and great skill in at least the ‘target’ language — and members of the
audience too can have headphones and a little thing like a portable radio, with
buttons for the language of one’s choice, relaying the voice of the relevant
interpreter.

During a coffee-break (it’s always out of the conference hall that the more interesting things
happen), Aris — an old hand at such dos — was approached by a less experienced
(or perhaps plain stupid) colleague: ‘Tell me, Ari, where can I buy one of
those little boxes? I want one for my mother: she watches lots of foreign
television, but she can’t understand the words…’

Thursday, 23 April 2015

As always, my putting a poem or two in the blog, foreign ones to boot, and even writing about them, has caused readership to plummet. Undeterred, today I give you one of mine; one I had forgotten but just found again in a corner of my computer:

Hard to Follow

But he keeps popping out, smiling, to say
how pleased he is to be back in the soil.
Of course, I realize he couldn’t say
this, or the other, from under the sod.
Still, ‘Yes, yes, Seamus. Lie down now.’

Simon
Darragh.

Putting a picture in often rescues the readership figures, so here's one of another Irish writer, J.M. Synge

Tuesday, 21 April 2015

Marot was born in Cahors in 1495, and died — lonely, having
been exiled from his native France on suspicion of being ‘sympathetic to
reform’ — in Turin in 1544.

At one time I lived in Athens with a French woman. Her
English used to make me laugh; my French used to make her cry. We communicated
mostly in Greek. At the time it was the fashion among some property owners
painstakingly to restore their old neo-classical houses, and among others to
tear them down and replace them with something in marble-faced concrete. Many
of the houses being demolished had plaster statuary in their porches or
gardens, and I would discreetly rescue some of this at dead of night. I got a
headless Venus de Milo — I found the head on a later foray — and an elegantly
lichen-covered plaster dog, about the size of a fox. This I tottered home with
after Jeanne had gone to bed and placed in the middle of the living-room floor,
for her to find in the morning, with the following poem copied out and stuck
under his front paws:

Though not as bad in this respect as modern Greek, French tends
to use more syllables than English to say ‘the same thing’. (I hope anyone who
has come this far now sees the reasons for the inverted commas). The choice
then in translating poetry is between padding, or shortening the lines.
Concision being of the essence of poetry I usually prefer the latter. Besides,
the difference in syllable-count is reflected in the common metres of each
language’s poetry: where French likes Alexandrines and Greek a fifteen-syllable
line, the common metres of English poetry are eight or ten syllables long.

I was woken in the early hours by the unmistakable sound of
a person tripping and falling heavily onto a tiled floor, followed by a shriek
of terror. The astute reader will have guessed what had happened.

New Year’s Gift

TO A YOUNG GIRL

Well-beloved girl,
My present for New Year:
A little canine churl
No bigger than your ear.
He’d bark, do tricks, and bite,
Take three steps at one trot,
And all for your delight,
Except that I forgot.

The other day an Englishman (I think) who is, among other
things, a professor of French Literature wrote to say he agreed with much I had
said about the business of Literary Translation. Personally I speak French
‘Vachement’; that is to say, much as a cow speaks Spanish. Thus (in true
British fashion) totally unqualified, I set about translating a French poem. A
mediæval French poem to boot. Here you are:

I'm afraid the poem has come out almost illegible, which may be just as well. It's possible that if you click on it you might be able to enlarge it into legibility.

Sunday, 19 April 2015

I was translating Modern Greek Poetry into English – partly
for love of Greek poetry, partly for interested friends – for several years
before it occurred to me that my translations might be worthy of publication.
To my pleased surprise some of them were, so being a believer in trade
unionism, as soon as I started earning money at it and had embarked, at an
editor’s invitation, on a book-length project, I joined the TA.

A little
later I attended my first translators’ conference, at (of course) U.E.A. I
expected to hear translators reading from, and discussing the difficulties
encountered in making, translations of particular works, and indeed there was
some of that. But what there was far more of was people – I’m not sure if they
were translators – giving long and complicated, though sometimes fascinating,
talks on ‘Translation Theory’. Typically, these did not refer to individual
works or even individual languages, except by way of illustrative example. Very
interesting, I thought; but is it any more likely to make me a better
translator than, say, a study of moral philosophy to make me a better person?

By the end
of the first full day of that first conference my interest was fighting a
losing battle with bafflement. What was this vast intellectual superstructure for? It didn’t seem to me likely to help
in the actual business of translation, indeed I thought that the way it had
been plonked down and built up over that business made it a hindrance. In the
evening, over a bottle (or two or three) of wine I rashly said roughly this to
some fellow drinkers. One or two nodded vigorously but said nothing, but some
others got very heated, until one of them got really cross and told me I didn’t
know what I was talking about and should shut up. As I was new to the business
I suppressed the thought that hitting a raw nerve so quickly and easily
suggested I might be on to something. From then on I did indeed shut up, and
decided I had better read all I could find on translation theory, and attend
(but quietly and deferentially) more translators’ conferences. I would also of
course continue translating.

At the
conferences and in the books I found, as before, much that was interesting but
irrelevant, and much that was mere intellectual flight of fancy reminiscent of
medieval schoolmen. There was a lot of talk about something all translators had
surely already long known: the ways in which a word or phrase, when shifted
into another language, carries only its ‘literal’ meaning but loses, or
acquires quite different, associations for the reader; the related matter of
how a phrase, when paraphrased into something that ‘ought’ to mean the same
thing (whatever that is) can turn out to mean something entirely different.
Sometimes talking and writing about this could get very convoluted; I heard
some very tortured and often frankly faulty logic. Not one of the speakers or
writers gave any evidence of having read the short works of Gottlob Frege and
Bertrand Russell in which the bases of these difficulties had, a century
earlier and very lucidly, been exposed and explained precisely and concisely.[1]

To his
credit, perhaps the most famous of translation theorists, after reading a paper
on what he called ‘residues’, agreed with me that nearly all he’d just said
could be, and had been, explained by the older and more familiar terms
‘Denotation’ and ‘Connotation’; ‘I don’t think it really matters what you call
them.’ He went on to tell me jolly stories of a famous jazz violinist to whom
I’d guessed he was related.

Then there
was the person who read a paper on the translation of jokes: like others I’d
gone hoping to hear a few, but no chance: she sat firmly behind a desk from
whose surface she never once looked up as she read the dull paper in a dull monotone.
No jokes, and no hint on how to translate them. The essence of translation is
communication.

It’s not
always like that of course: sometimes things happen at conferences that are far
from translation theory, and so more helpful. These are most often outside the
conference rooms, but, staying with jokes, there was the workshop given by a
lady who translates the ‘Asterix’ books, who set us to actually translating
jokes. Best of all was the lady who had had the job of translating Monty Python
scripts for Swedish Television. Significantly, she started – after playing ‘The
Liberty Bell’ on her cassette machine – by saying that she ‘Knew nothing about
translation’: she went on to prove, hilariously, that she knew a great deal
about translation; she just didn’t know she knew it. That’s my point: one
doesn’t need to.

I don’t go
to translation conferences much now, and am more selective in the books I read
about translation. Nothing I ever heard or read – and it was a lot – did
anything to modify my original tentatively held idea about translation: that it
is, above all, an intuitive process, and the gift for translation might be
related to, but is distinct from, gifts for foreign languages. First you
translate, then, if you like, you can theorize.

I don’t think
translation theory is a complete waste of time except, paradoxically, for the
practising translator. Translation theory is fascinating and gives us
interesting ideas, some of which may be genuine insights into the ways
languages work. It might even bring illumination to a translator who is puzzled
about what he or she has just done – after it is done – but I think more than a
small dose of it is likely to make him or her into a worse rather than better
translator. I’m afraid this is already happening; sometimes in reading recent
English translations of foreign novels I am brought up short by chunks of
inelegant writing showing the marks of ill-digested theory.

The
relation between translation and translation studies is like that between music
and musicology. One can be a practising musician or one can be a musicologist,
and indeed many people, finding they had only small talents for music making,
have become fine musicologists. And some good musicians also do some
musicology, but that this makes them better performers is doubtful. What is
certain is that all the musicology in the world will never make you into a
musician. As a famous opera singer said, ‘Either you got the voice or you don’t
got the voice.’

Saturday, 18 April 2015

Yesterday I gave you my English translation of a poem by Cavafy; a poem that might be said to sit on some critically-imagined border between his Historical Poems and his Naughty Poems. I didn't however give you the original Greek, which was remiss of me; one should always be able to see the original even if one doesn't know its language. My excuse is that I was very tired. Here it is, scanned from my copy of the complete, or at least the canonical, poems; the first book I bought in Greece: (the second was a Greek-English dictionary).

Friday, 17 April 2015

In the Dives…

In the divesand
bordellos
of Beirut I wallow.I
didn’t want to stay
in Alexandria; not I.Tamides
has left me:
he’s gone with the mayor’s sonjust
to get
a Nile villaand
a house in town.
It wouldn’t do to stayin
Alexandria —
In the divesand
bordellos
of Beirut I wallow.In
cheap debauch
I squander my life.All
that saves me
like a lasting beauty,like
a lingering scent
that stays on my flesh,is
for two years I had
Tamides my own,that
magnificent boy,
and not for a houseor
a villa on the Nile.

The above is my translation of a poem by Cavafy. It was not
included by the young Greek girls who read some of Cavafy’s poems, in both the
original and in David Connolly’s excellent new English translations (published
in Athens by Aiora), so I was going to read it, in both languages, myself, but
somehow there wasn’t time. So, since it has been a few days since I wrote a
blog entry, here it is now. And here’s a picture of Cavafy himself; ‘The old poet
of the city’, as Lawrence Durrell called him in his Alexandria Quartet:

Tuesday, 14 April 2015

Just as Jews have a special license to make Jewish jokes —
they always know the best ones — those who are or have been ‘Mentally Ill’
(Madness is not an illness; it is just madness) are allowed to make jokes about
it.

I soon got the hang of it in my first mental hospital. We
would surround the shy, nervous new admission in a friendly way: ‘So. D’you
like it here?’ ‘Oh. Yes, yes…’ they would reply eagerly. ‘Then you must be mad’
and we would all fall about in the special cackling laughter one hears in such
places, in which they would usually join. Only very rarely would they burst
into tears, in which case we would of course comfort them, if not with apples,
then with the tea and sweet biscuits which are always in endless supply in
mental hospitals.

Mad people are usually neither stupid nor wiltingly
hypersensitive. On the contrary, madness tends to affect the above-averagely
intelligent, and you’ve got to be pretty robust — mentally if not physically —
to survive it.

Some doctors and even psychiatrists seem not to know this,
but nursing staff always do. When I was in the psychiatric ward of a large
general hospital in Southend (don’t ask) but was allowed out provided I didn’t
stay away too long, I used to tell the nursing staff ‘I’m going for a walk to
the end of the pier.’ (pause for effect.) ‘When I get to the end, I plan to
turn round, and walk back here.’ They liked that.

One day while I was in that same hospital the blood-donor
van came and set up shop next door. I went along to give my half-litre and the
nurse who was taking it asked where I lived. ‘Well, just at the moment, in the
psychiatric ward next door.’ ‘Oh, what for?’ ‘Suicidal depression. But don’t
worry, I’m not about to kill myself right here.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t mind
if you do, because then we could have all
your blood.’

Monday, 13 April 2015

In the USA, a white policeman can abuse, beat up, and even
shoot to death a black man, claim he was acting in self-defence, and get away
with it. Only if someone has caught the scene on video will he be in trouble.

The USA authorities send people they suspect of planning
terrorism to other countries, to be tortured by other people. It does however
keep a special enclave in, of all places, Cuba, where it imprisons people
without trial or even charge and practices ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’
(that’s what torture is called when Americans do it) on them.

In the USA, people are framed for murders they didn’t
commit, kept under sentence of death for as long as 28 years, then, following
an absurdly delayed retrial, released. (That’s black people of course.)

Now, President Obama — the token black Uncle Tom the USA has
chosen to ‘reassure’ its people that all is well — has deigned to make friendly
overtures to Raoul Castro of Cuba. He’s hoping to talk to him about Cuba’s
human rights record.

Sunday, 12 April 2015

The less visible the poet, the more visible (and so often
the better) the poetry. A week or two ago I gave here an example of a poem by
our present Poet Laureate, and compared it with an extract from a poem by an
earlier Laureate. Now that might have been unfair; it may be that the Carol Ann
Duffy poem I quoted was not one of her best, and it may be that the Tennyson
verses were among his best. I should perhaps have expressed my dislike, indeed
disapproval, of Duffy, and my admiration for Tennyson in more general or
abstract terms; the sort of terms a really good critic (which I don’t claim to
be) might use. I remembered however that TS Eliot had said what I should have liked
to say, and far better than I could, but I couldn’t remember just where he’d
said it. This morning I came across it again, in his collection of essays ‘The
Sacred Wood’:

‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape
from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality.’

Saturday, 11 April 2015

No, not a picnic basket, nor Hemingway’s book about Paris.
‘Movable Feast’ is the Christian church’s term for a festival whose actual date
varies. Easter is such a feast, and not just because it has to fall on a
Sunday, and Good Friday has to be (duh) a Friday; that would limit the
variation to a week, but it’s much wider. I can’t claim to be in on the arcana
of the calculations; the protestants and Roman Catholics have one way of
working it out in common, and the Greek Orthodox another one entirely. As for
the Old Calendarist Orthodox, no doubt they have their own way too.

Orthodox and Protestant/Catholic Easter coincide once every
four years; this year Orthodox Easter is a week after Protestant/Catholic, but
sometimes the difference is as much as a month. Whenever I ask anyone how
Orthodox Easter is calculated, he or she says ‘Well it’s got something to do
with the moon’, but they don’t say what.
This year, however, I find a clue in my Greek diary: Orthodox Easter coincides
with the start of the last quarter of the moon. Now when the last quarter of
the moon starts, it rises at midnight. (Proper, sidereal midnight, i.e.
half-way between sunset and sunrise, whatever the clock says.) And in the
Orthodox tradition, the resurrection of Christ is celebrated, with much ringing
of bells, fireworks, and in some parts of Greece gunshots and even sticks of
dynamite tossed playfully about, on the dot of midnight between Saturday and
Sunday.

Here — yes, I know I’ve put it in the blog before — is Piero
della Francesca’s painting of the terrifying original event:

Friday, 10 April 2015

I never thought the day would come when I had a word to say
in favour of mobile phones or ‘Social Media’ such as Facebook. Now it has.

We have been suffering from ‘Indignation Fatigue’: the
scenario in which in America a white policeman abuses, beats up, even kills an
unarmed black man, tells self-justifying lies when and if called to account,
and is completely exonerated has become so common that our indignation centres
are having to take a little rest; we just think wearily ‘Oh, God, not again.’

But just recently, witnesses have been filming such episodes
on their mobile phones. They then post the film on a ‘Social Medium’ such as
Facebook, where, as they say, it ‘goes viral’. (This curious and unpleasant
expression just means ‘becomes popular’, ‘is looked at by many people’: I suppose
you could say that Michael Jackson, for instance, or a royal wedding, ‘went
viral’, unless of course you prefer to speak good English.) When this happens,
not even the people who are supposed to police the police have the chutzpah to
pretend to believe the policeman’s story, and they have to actually seem to
punish him. Now, if you’re a white policeman and you shoot a black boy taking
soft drinks and crisps home to his parents, you may get your wrist slapped and
be told not to do it too often.

Only, of course, if there is evidence, such as a video
recording, that can’t be ignored: ‘Mere’ verbal evidence from a dozen
bystanders will be discounted — especially if they are black — in favour of the
policeman’s story. (That happens in England too, as I know to my cost).

It’s shocking, but we have to accept it: policemen will
misbehave, and then tell lies about it, unless the rest of us watch and record
what they are doing. Journalists — the good ones anyway — have always been
guardians of our liberties. Now we see that so, too, are mobile phones and
Facebook.

Wednesday, 8 April 2015

The first responsibility of Alexis Tsipras is of course to
the people of Greece, who have suffered nothing this bad since the wartime
occupation by Germany, when all the food, not to mention the gold reserves, were taken to the Fatherland. If the richer countries of Europe which
welcomed Greece with open arms when it suited them won’t help now, then of
course Greece must look elsewhere. News media in those richer countries have
been somewhat sniffy about where she is currently looking; they don’t like it
and they point out that Russia too has what are euphemistically called ‘Economic
Problems’. However, shortage of money is not actually among those problems. I
don’t think Frau Merkel has actually seen the beggars huddled shivering in
Athens shop doorways during what has been an unusually long and wet winter; any
decent person who has will be thinking ‘Good luck, Alexi.’ And if it gets up
the noses of Frau Merkel and President Obama, then frankly so much the better.

Tuesday, 7 April 2015

Radio news in the last few days has been telling us about
the chap who was wrongly convicted of murder thirty years ago, and has only
just been released following a retrial. This was in — where else? — the United
States of America. He has, it seems, spent 28 years on what is called ‘Death
Row’: the row of cells in many American prisons set aside to house those whom
the authorities intend, one day, to kill.

I heard reports on BBC, VOA, DW, and even Radio Japan. Not
one of them mentioned the chap’s skin-colour. Why indeed should they? What
could it possibly have to do with his guilt or innocence? Even so, I must admit
to idly saying to myself ‘I wonder if he happens to be black?’ The man himself
later confirmed, in an interview broadcast by the BBC, that he is in fact
black, that he was black at the time of his arrest, and that he was fitted up
because he was black.

For a man who has spent half his life in prison — for
anyone — he is a remarkably calm, clear speaker, and seems, as far as
one can tell from a radio interview, to be what some of us would call ‘A decent
sort of chap’. He suggests that America should set its own house in order
before criticizing the human rights records of other countries.

Most remarkable of all, he says he is not angry. Well I for
one am bloody furious.

Saturday, 4 April 2015

I expect most readers know what a metaphor is. But
‘Ousiastic’? Well I admit I just made the word up, though I felt confident it
must already exist. However I find it’s not in the Oxford Dictionary. I derived it from
the Greek ‘Ousia’ which means ‘substance’, so if something is ‘ousiastic’ it’s
an actual thing, and not ‘merely’ an idea or some other abstract entity. Now a
metaphor is something verbal; we might be talking or writing about actual
things, but the metaphors we use are figures of speech. By‘Ousiastic Metaphor’ I mean using an actual thing in place of some other thing that
we can’t or won’t use.

Slipping on a banana-skin was a trope of early silent comedy
films. Some chap is strolling along the street and suddenly he whips out a
banana, eats it, and tosses the skin over his shoulder. Someone else comes
along, steps on it, and falls over. This joke became standard and was repeated
right up to the days of Woody Allen: in one of his films there are giant
bananas, about six foot long, and sure enough Woody Allen eats one and drops
the skin, and we are all laughing proleptically because we know that any second
his pursuers will slip on it.

But hold on: how often, in real life, do people eat bananas
in the street, and then toss the skin down? How often do people then slip on them?
Are banana skins notoriously slippery? (No, they’re not actually: try to slip
on one.) What is slippery and often
found on pavements is something else entirely: dog shit. People regularly stand
in it and often slip over. But dog or indeed any kind of shit, like primary and
even secondary sexual organs, are things whose existence the Great American
Public prefers not to acknowledge; only very advanced modern films allow them.

So there you are: the old silent comedies used banana-skins
as an ousiastic metaphor for dog shit.

(The difficult-to-make-out black and white picture is a
still from a Harold Lloyd film, said to show the first recorded example of the
banana-skin joke.)

Friday, 3 April 2015

When I go to hear a performance of the two-part inventions —
or more likely select a recording to listen to, since I live too far away to
get to a live performance — it is Bach I want to hear. That may seem just a
touch obvious. What I mean is, my main interest in the performer is in his or
her ability to play the pieces well, and not in his personal eccentricities.
Many performers, including some of the best, feel an urge to hum or drone along
with the music. It’s understandable, but I’d like them to refrain from
expressing that urge. Having worked as a recording engineer, I know that it’s
easy to place the microphones in such a way as not to pick up odd noises from
the performer, and — especially nowadays — not all that difficult to edit out
any that get through. But such is the vulgarity of modern taste that people
actually want those noises, and I
have seen mikes deliberately sited to pick them up. A really quite good
professional pianist — she is more Mozart than Bach, and plays his sonatas with
the respect they deserve — to whom I mentioned this said ‘Oh, I think it’s all
part of the Glenn Gould Experience.’ (Glenn Gould is a particularly bad
offender, and actually I don’t even like his interpretations, neither of Bach
nor Mozart.) But I don’t want ‘The Glenn
Gould Experience’; I want the Bach Experience.
And the same goes for Beethoven and Schubert. Here of course the best player is
or was Alfred Brendel, who understood especially Schubert’s music better than Franz himself. Unfortunately
in his later recordings he had a tendency to hum along, and the crass people in
charge of recording mixed this intrusively into the final records. The ‘Alfred
Brendel Experience’, if that’s what you want to call it, is well worth having,
and is available in some recordings — sound and video; his facial expressions
are priceless — he made in Salzburg some years ago. But when he’s playing
Schubert’s piano works — which he does better than anybody; if the B flat
Deutsch 960 is too daunting then at least try to hear one of his recordings of
the G flat major impromptu — it’s Schubert I want to hear, not Alfred Brendel
humming.

But back to the Bach two-part inventions. I was listening to
an hour or two of recordings by various people last night. The very best of the
four or five I have ofthe F minor — for
my taste one of the loveliest of the set — is by a little girl of I would guess
about thirteen. She has the skill and talent to play it really well, and the
humility to know that — like Glenn Gould, who doesn’t know it — she is insignificant next to J.S. Bach.

Thursday, 2 April 2015

Well, only a little bit. That photograph yesterday of Nikola
Tesla apparently calmly sitting and reading a book while a spectacular
artificial lightning display zapped about him was in fact a double exposure.
But I have seen some genuine photographs of him standing with one hand on the
top of one of his large ‘Tesla Coils’ (a sort of high-frequency transformer)
and allowing absurdly long arcs, sparks, ionized electrical discharges,
whatever you want to call them to pass over, under, and even through him with
no apparent ill effect.

Tesla had an endearing taste for the spectacular and showy,
and an imagination guaranteed to cause the people he talked to, especially
Patent Office officials and potential business partners, to think ‘We’ve got a
right one ’ere’ but this could be misleading: he had a knowledge and
understanding of complex electrical matters such as the behaviour of
multi-phase alternating currents in inductive and capacitive circuitry that
would put the most advanced physicists to shame, and many of his ingenious
inventions became essential to modern technology.

No picture today; I drank too much a couple of evenings ago
before I was well enough to do so and am very tired.